


Perfect People and Perfect Houses

by Acai



Series: A Collection of Works in Which Undertale is Sad [3]
Category: Undertale
Genre: Breaking down, Chara and Frisk headcanons, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, DFAB Frisk, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Frisk Needs A Hug, Goat Mom Is Best Mom, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Neglect, Manipulation, Misgendering, Panic Attacks, Running Away, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, frisk says a lot of words, gender bias, quiet frisk, toriel is a good mom, toriel makes tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 06:50:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5957722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about the internet is that it can be misleading. On the internet people tell their parents that they don't want to be assigned a gender and everything is perfect and fine and their family goes on loving them. In the real world, all that happens is long days spent locked in a guest room and a mother who thinks she can fix you by forcing you to wear pink and sparkles. She can't change you. All she does is break you. It takes a long time. It takes two years of being away from her before you finally break down. </p>
<p>Aren't you glad you have a real family to help you back up?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfect People and Perfect Houses

**Author's Note:**

> Just another sadistic hurt/comfort that I wrote in the late hours of the night before one of the biggest tests of the year. I don't regret it. But I might in the future.

_**Perfect People and Perfect Houses** _

The thing about the internet is that it can be deceiving.

No matter how much research you do, no matter how you word the things that you say, no matter how you act—you can’t control how people will feel.

That’s the thing about being human, though. Everyone’s got such intricate emotions, so many uncontrollable emotions. You suppose that’s why you’re here, now. You suppose that’s why you can’t force yourself to feel like a girl. You suppose that’s why you couldn’t force your mother to agree with you on the subject.

You suppose that it was worth a shot, anyway. You can’t help but wish that you hadn’t tried anything, though.

On the internet things go so well for people all the time. They tell their parents, ‘mum, dad, I don’t feel like a boy or a girl,’ and their parents say, ‘okay, that’s fine, your feelings are valid,’ and everyone’s happy.

You told your mum, ‘mum, I don’t feel like a girl or a boy,’ and she stared you down. You explained to her—you told her all about how you didn’t feel like you were either gender. She’d scowled down at you, telling you to cut the crap.

You didn’t cut the crap. You amped it up, pressing and nagging and trying and begging for her to validate your feelings. She grew just as fed up with you as you were with her.

She sat you down one day, explaining to you that you were a sweet little _girl._

“I didn’t spend my whole life raising a cretin,” she reprimanded you. “I spent my years raising a nice young lady. You are a very nice, _feminine_ young lady. I want you to see that this little game isn’t funny. People like that—people like that are disgusting, do you understand? Don’t make jokes about that. Don’t think like that. From now on, I’m putting an end to this. You’re a lady, you’ll behave like one.”

She was determined to make you feel a way that you couldn’t make yourself feel.

When her first methods didn’t work she moved on—she did everything that she could.

 First it was your clothes. Good-bye, baggy sweaters and joggers. Good-bye, running shoes. Hello, pink, frilly dresses and skirts. Hello, low-cut v-necks that made guys stare. Hello, red Mary Janes and hello, pink ballroom flats.

You used to go out wearing gray attire that didn’t have to belong to a gender.

Now you go out in low-cut shirts and pink skirts and heeled shoes. It makes you want to scream. She picks your outfits out for you every morning like you’re three years old. She doesn’t let you go places, only invites people over to your house. Girls your age. She paints your nails every three days, pretty pinks and purples and French tips.

She ensures that your hair grows out quickly, makes sure it’s brushed and braided and plaited and prettied. She signs you up for a special all-girls school.

She chides you for slouching, for walking like a guy, for doing anything that’s not 100% feminine.

You’ve never so much wanted to die.

You can’t stand this.

Does she even know what she’s doing?

Does she know how she’s making you feel, in dresses with plaited hair?

Does she know that you cry over the trips to the movies that she sets up with boys who like to let their hands wander to the low-cut shirts she sends you out in to remind you that you have _breasts?_

Does she know that when you’re at that all-girls school you skip half your classes in the bathroom trying to make the dumb dresses look less girly _somehow?_

You know she does. You know she’ll keep it up until you break.

You break, all right.

You break one night, stowing away in the bathroom to swallow as many pills as you can. _Ladylike_ —you’ll give her ladylike! What’s a lady, after all, if not quiet and unseen? What’s a lady, if not ensuring she stirs up no trouble at all?

She wants ladylike—she can have it. She can have the quiet, the silence of the action, she can have the unseen—who’s going to see you in here doing the deed? She can have no trouble at all, what’s it going to matter to her when you’re gone? She can dress up your pretty little corpse all she likes, can’t she?

You can’t be anything _but_ a lady, down there in that grave in the dress she’ll plant you down there in, with your pretty little name and the word ‘daughter’ on the gravestone.

You’re sobbing, tearing up the frills of the expensive little skirt. Did she ever really think this whole ploy would work? Did she ever really expect anything other than this unfortunate outcome…

You sure hope she didn’t.

Your mum comes in to find you retching, feverish and sick and pathetic.

The internet isn’t trustworthy at all, the internet said it would be quiet and painless and soft and ladylike.

It’s painful and agonizing and everything is on fire and this is the worst experience of your life. The point was to die—but you didn’t think it’d be like this, the bang that you’re going out with.

She drags you to the guest room and locks the door from the outside. She drives you to your all-girls school in a brightly colored dress and a plaited hairdo and pink nails and pink Mary Janes.

She picks you up and locks you back in the guest room, keeping it up for so long that you aren’t sure how long it’s been since this vicious cycle began. You don’t care enough to ask or check.

The joke’s on her, you suppose.

In the guest room there’s a dresser filled with clothes for both boys’ and girls’. You pick out an outfit from each side, a baggy blue and purple tee from the girl’s and pants from the guy’s. You shove them in your backpack, sliding your gaze over to the window. You flip the locks to unlock it, slide open the glass, kick out the screen, clamber out and run.

You run and run and run and run—no one’s chasing you, no one’s coming for you, you don’t even know if anyone knows that you’re gone.

You run all the same. You’re running away from so many things and they’re trying to chase you, but you aren’t going to let them catch you this time.

Your skirt and your hair fly out behind you as you run. When you were little you liked Mount Ebott—mostly because of the field trip you took there when you were little where you learned about the monsters. You run there, even if you aren’t sure why.

On the climb up your skirt feels airy and uncomfortable, but you keep climbing.

The top grows steep and then evens out, becoming nearly flat. You take that opportunity to shrug off the skirt and pull on the clothes. You laugh, sounding slightly insane to even yourself. You hold the skirt high up in the air and allow the wind to snatch it away from you. You giggle crazily watching the wind yank it on its way.

 You laugh, unplaiting your hair and ruffling it and kicking off the Mary Janes and pulling on your gym sneakers from the inside of your schoolbag. You laugh, falling on your back and becoming dirty and dusty.

You trip and stumble and fall when you get back up.

You don’t flail for grip, you don’t try to stop your fall or catch yourself. You don’t even scream. You just allow yourself to fall.

And you do, you fall for so long and for so far. You feel like you’re flying when you close your eyes.

You aren’t too worried about whether or not you’ll be okay when you land. You aren’t too worried about what waits for you at the bottom of the mountain.

  * -    -



The bottom of the mountain is always the same. No matter how much determination is coursing through your veins when you reset, no matter how many times you reset, no matter who you _kill_ in the resets…it’s always the same. Sometimes that’s the only reason that you reset. Because it’s always the same, but it’s always different. It’s different than the human world.

The first time that you’d gone stumbling into Snowdin, choppy hair blowing into your face and pale fists balled at your sides, you’d still been on the run. You were still running from something that wasn’t chasing you. You were still hiding from someone who wasn’t looking for you. You ran nonetheless.

Monsters don’t all look the same. There’s groups of monsters, more than one Temmie, more than one Moldsmal, more than one skeleton—but at least they aren’t all human. Their houses, too, are all different.

Some houses are tall and lanky and tower over you, some houses and little and purple and splotchy. But they’re all different and imperfect rather than set in little rows of perfect white houses with perfect green lawns.

The monsters that you befriend and their houses that you visit are so different than the perfect people and perfect houses that you remember from the human world.

You befriend them all, sure, but you kill them all, too. Sometimes when you’re mad, sometimes when you’re bitter you grab the knife at Toriel’s and _kill._

You kill anything and everything that comes across your path. It’s sadistic and cruel but you like killing the innocent ones the most, when you go through those angry fits.

The first time that you’d done _that_ you’d killed everything and left an empty world—no more imperfect people. You’d ridded the world of all the innocence, ridded it of everything that had never had to go through what you had.

Because you were bitter and angry at a woman who wasn’t here.

Not them.

You weren’t mad at them.

They didn’t deserve what you did to them and everyone they loved.

\- - -

 

And when that world finally ends and you reset everything you meet a new friend. They call themselves Chara and they like to kill things, too. They’re bitter, too. They’re not a boy or a girl, just like you.

You think that’s the only reason that you were okay with them being there, at first. You’d never met anyone like you, and even though you knew that you weren’t the _only_ one (the internet said there was loads of people like you), it was still nice to meet someone who felt the same way—even if you had to share a body with them.

You don’t know why they’re mad at the humans, but they’re pretty mad at all the humans. That’s your only difference, though. You’re mad, too, but you’re willing to let the anger go for the part of the human race that’s not cruel and wicked and sadistic.

Chara refuses to acknowledge the good side of their own race. You’re trying to get them there, though.

\---

 

Your anger runs out eventually, leaving you feeling empty and upset. When that day comes it’s a week after you’ve reached the surface for your thirty first pacifist run. It’s after your fiftieth complete reset, and you realize then that you’re _tired._

 

You forget for a moment why, exactly, you’re running. You realize then that you don’t even have a reason to be running. Are you really running from that woman on the other side of the mountain?

 

Are you really running from someone who didn’t even file a report looking for you?

 

You are, you suppose.                                        

You’re so tired of running, though. You’re so tired of being bitter. You’re out of anger to fuel you, there’s nothing more to keep you going with these resets. Chara argues with that, but there’s nothing telling you to listen but Chara themself.

They hush up and listen to your thoughts after a little while, stopping their irritating commentary and leaving you to your own _tired_ thoughts.

You don’t want to run from her anymore. You don’t want to run from the all-girls school thirty miles away from your new school. You don’t want to run from the pink skirt that you let blow away, you don’t want to run away from the guest bedroom where you were kept. You’re so _tired_ of running from the place that forced you to be a nice, young lady.

You’re at school now, which isn’t the best place to have a life-altering discovery. You’re tired, though, and you can’t bring yourself to care. You want to sit down right here in the middle of the hallway. You stop walking, letting someone’s shoulder hit your own.

Chara swears at you loudly, demanding an explanation from you.

You don’t give them one, taking in a long breath and staying right there in the middle of the hallway. You let Chara rip control from you and curl up in the back of your mind while they maneuver to a restroom.

When the bell rings and you’re alone with Chara they wriggle their way back to the back of your mind where they like to be and you’re forced back into control, slumping down the wall and onto the dirty floor. Chara grabbed your phone at some point and it’s open to Sans in the contacts.

They hit ‘call’ for you, swearing at you under your own breath. He picks up after several rings with a, “sup?”

You don’t bother saying anything, staring blankly at the phone. What does Chara want you to say? Why can’t _they_ talk to Sans, if they want it so badly? He _knows_ they’re there, after all.

“Yo, kid?” His voice emits from the phone, prodding you. You let out a little sniffle of reply, a single tear sneaking down your face.

“I want to go home,” you whisper to him. He’s quiet for a little while.

“I’ll be there in ten, alright, kid?” You press ‘end’ without saying anything, dropping your phone in your pocket and not moving from your place on the bathroom floor. Chara takes over for you again, not forcing you back this time.

You zone out, letting Chara deal with things for a little while, keeping to yourself in the back of your mind.

When you blink your way back into reality after your breakdown it’s sundown and you’re on the couch watching Soul Eater, a show Chara is rather fond of. They must feel you coming back because they prod you back to control. They don’t force you this time, though, and you’re so very grateful for that.

You do take control again, knowing that Chara very much dislikes having to both with the body and very much prefers to just nestle in the back of your head and watch everything, guiding you and offering sarcastic little comments that you don’t care to listen to.

They’re laying off you for now.

_I told Sans you were having a bad day,_ they inform you. _It’s been a couple of hours, he went out to grab something to eat about ten minutes ago. We’re home alone. Mum—Toriel won’t be back for another hour._

You’re home alone. You can do anything, you can go anywhere. No one’s here to stop you.

You’re tired, too tired to think about where you would go if you could go anywhere.

You know where you’d go.

You’d go back to your mother’s. Your biological mother’s, you mean. Not to stay—good god, no!

But you’d visit her. You’d announce to her, ‘ _here I am! This is me! Fuck you, mum!’_ You know where to go, you know what you’re doing even though you don’t. You know exactly what you’re doing when you get up and walk out the door and jump on a bus and sit in the back, even if you don’t. You’re not paying attention to anything you do as you do it—it’s like having Chara in control, even though Chara obviously isn’t in control. How would they know where to go to see your old mum?

Your throat is sore and scratchy and you’re standing on her doorstep.

You’re going to turn around. Your arm lifts and rings the doorbell. That was Chara, you’re sure.

The door swings open. There she is, in all her former glory. She stares down at you uncomprehendingly for a little while before she frowns, scoffing.

“Finally come crawling back, huh? Well, I’ll have you know I’m not just going to welcome you back, you little wretch. I already got rid of your things. I’ve got a good heart, though, and kept a hold on your place at school and there’s always a place in the guest bedroom…”

“I’m not crawling back,” you tell her, snapping at her. “I’m visiting. I’m not staying. You make me tired. You make me really tired. I left here fully intending to die, but I didn’t. I think… I think that I don’t even care what you say anymore, because I’m not yours. I was never yours to begin with. You… you _own_ a nice, young lady in pink. But… I’m… I’m just a kid who _lives_ with some really great people who…who I call my family! And this is me and—and this has always been me! And I’m not—I’m not a nice young lady in pink coming back to my owner, I’m—I’m a living person who’s come to say good-bye to my mum…out of obligation. So… I’d like it if you said good-bye back.”

She stares at you for such a long time.

She’s silent, not speaking, not drifting, just staring at you with an expression that doesn’t express a thing. 

That’s okay. You didn’t come here to get her opinion.

“Good-bye, Francesca.”

“Frisk,” you tell her flatly, turning around and walking away. You do glance back, and it’s just in time to see a closing door and a pink dress hung over a chair.

\---

You’re home at midnight. Toriel is furious, to say the least, when she answers the door to you. She’s demanding you tell her just _where you were and why you didn’t call and do you have any idea how worried we were, child?_

But you just start crying and she hugs you and doesn’t say another word.

She doesn’t pry or prod, doesn’t force you to say a thing. When you don’t stop crying after an award-winning thirty minutes she just picks you up and brings you to the living room, making you comfy on her lap on the couch while she puts on a nature documentary. She doesn’t ignore you for it, though, and you’re pretty sure she put it on as a distraction to _you._ Your tears finally succumb to sniffles while you watch the lion on the screen and the flowers blowing about.

Chara’s being awfully silent up in your mind.

You think of your biological mother’s goodbye, how it sounded fake and unreal and uncaring. How you don’t think she really did care at all. Your eyes bubble up with tears again and Toriel must see this because she rushes to shush you and cuddle you and tells you that she’s going to go make some tea.

You pick at your sleeves while you wait on the couch all by yourself.

The stairs creak behind you—how long has Sans been home?

_Probably a pretty long time. It’s one in the morning, stupid._

Thanks for the commentary, nobody asked.

He sits beside you, not saying anything except, “Lions, huh?”

You spread yourself across his lap, getting comfortable and sniffling again. His eyes are on the lions. You don’t think he’s really watching the documentary.

“I went to go see my mum,” you tell him softly. “My…my birth mum, I mean.” He remains silent. You think that means it’s safe to go on. “She didn’t say much. She was a little mean but…I think she always is, anyway. She never looked for me while I was gone. Sometimes I thought…that maybe if I reset enough then eventually…she’d notice I was gone. That was silly, wasn’t it?” You shrug your thoughts off, shifting on his lap again.

He still hasn’t said anything, though, and you take that as yet another prompt to keep going. “She thought I was coming back to stay, though.  I told her that I wasn’t. I told her that I’ve got better places to live. I told her I wanted her to tell me goodbye, and she did, you know?”

You aren’t one for talking—you’re pretty sure you can count the number of times you’ve ever said _this_ much to _anyone_ on one of your hands. Maybe that’s why he’s not saying anything back.

Maybe he’s surprised.

You don’t think that’s it. You think he just knows that you have to say this, that this is a conversation you’re having with yourself. You keep going.

“I liked her when I was little. She was fun back then. I think…she would have stayed fun, if I hadn’t told her what I had. I’m not sorry I did, though. If I hadn’t told her that all the way back then, then she never would have tried to change me and I never would have run away and I never would have fallen down that hole. Where would we be then? Toriel wouldn’t be making tea right now and I’d be sad. Everyone would still be underground, except the humans.

“Truthfully…I think that it was wrong, the way that everything worked out all the way back then. I think…that it’s so wrong that monsters were underground and humans were up here. Monsters…they’re all so nice. And humans, well, They’re human. They’re doing the best they can. _We’re_ doing the best we can. Sometimes I think… I don’t really feel like either.” You giggle to yourself. “Maybe that’s just my thing, though, not feeling like either. Not a boy or a girl, not a human or a monster.

“There’s an obvious choice for each one, every time. But…it’s not a choice I’d like to make when I can hover right in the middle. Right where I’m happy. And…she didn’t get that. So I left. And… I’m not sorry that I went to go tell her goodbye. I’m just sorry that when she said it back, she didn’t mean it.”

“I’m glad you’re happy with your choices, kid.” Sans tells you, and you know that even though he’s a sarcastic asshole, sometimes, this time he means what he says. You sniffle one more time.

Toriel’s back with the tea, placing a cup in front of you.

“If I’d known you were coming downstairs I would have made you one, too!” She chides Sans, bustling back to the kitchen. He grins a little bit wider at that.

“What a mum, am I right?”

Yeah. Yeah, what a mum. Probably the best darn mother out there, Toriel is. In every story that you ever read as a little kid, the mum was always dead. But whenever anyone talked about the mum—well, whenever they talked about their mum, she was a perfect and beautiful woman who deserved the whole world.

You think that’s Toriel, the perfect mum that every kid dreams of.

It took you a long time to get to her—hell,  you fell down a hole and saved a whole race to get to her.

You’re not complaining, though.

Being the ambassador isn’t easy—of course it’s not easy, if it were easy then you’d be doing your job wrong. But you’re here with Sans, who picks you up from school without making you tell him why, and with Toriel, who makes you tea and lets you cry and puts on lion documentaries when you do, and with everyone who you’ve killed time and time again, but with everyone who you’ve spaced twenty-fold.

And this is okay, because this is the way that it’s supposed to be.  

**Author's Note:**

> I will literally always write prompts for one-shots that people leave me. Leave me ideas, prompts and one shots, tell me if you found a mistake and like always, tell me what you thought. I still crave comments, and I appreciate them more than you'll ever know! (Please, I risked my IA score for this sadism.)


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